July 27, 2012

I didn't write this on my own. In fact, I didn't write it at all. Meade wrote this:

Lord North: Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by colonists and yeomen who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.

George Washington: Without our consent, we reject your taxes.

Lord North: There are a lot of smart people out there in the New World. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking British subjects of the Crown out there.

Lord North: If you yankees were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great King somewhere in your life. Some members of Parliament helped to create this unbelievable Royal Navy system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in French and Indian Wars and the East India Company.

Alexander Hamilton: The King is your king. He is only our king by our agreement.

Lord North: If you've got a medical practice or silver smithery or a cabinetmaking business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The printing press didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the printing press so that all the pamphleteers could make money off the printing press.

Lord North: All right, all right - everybody just calm down. In politics, we all tolerate a certain amount of spin. I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. Although when folks just, like, omit entire sentences of what you said, they start kind of splicing and dicing, you may have gone a little over the edge there, you pesky Americans.

76 comments:

Let me say from the Oval Room Happy Hour discussion with the super-K-street gang (WH, DNC, CAP, NYT, NPR, PBS, etc.). The word is that the focus now is on GOP and Romney. He has spoiled our relations with England/Olympics.

So, our words-taken-out-of-context will not be carried in media. Of course, NYT does not carry. Nor do all the bloggers we like and we invite to the WH.

So, in time, we will just focus on Romney and the Olympics. It is all over for the GOP.

No one can beat the POTUS. We are simply the best. We are so good that even the devil is worried about running against us. In fact, looking back the 43 presidencies, no can match our attention to details, our fund-raising, our destiny. We belong in the WH and we will stay there till January of 2017.

Romney, forget you. No one likes you. Just ask Gail "Dog on the Roof" Collins.

You didn't build your house.Others built it, and the government gave you the financial system, the tax deduction to buy it. Government enabled the resources to be tapped - lumber, the steel, concrete..on government roads.

The house you live in is only worth 400,000 in equity vs. an identical one in Detroit worth 35,000 because government and The Village...making it so.

Since so much of that home equity is really due to others, we need to levelize matters so the Detroit house is worth more and yours worth less - in the name of fairness.

Your guy gave the PM media that wouldn't play on English TV/video systems, gave the Queen an iPod loaded with his speeches, sent back the Churchill bust from the White House, and he or his staff said there was "nothing special" about the relationship between the U.S. and England.

The point, garage, is that the same socialist argument Obama makes against one form of wealth - an established business, can be made at other sources of wealth - home equity, creative product like a screenplay or sculpture, a family farm.

A little different than job income - reservoirs of wealth Obama is saying aren't really all deserved to be with the owner..beause "others" helped make it. So others should get a cut.

We all know where this case for socialism will lead. The Obama goal is government controlled redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.

I suppose the government could even make a case that, on behalf of people that "built it", government 15 trillion in debt also deserves a cut of the wealth of charities and NGOs.

Suppose you got a point there garage if Althouse just wandered thru Madison one day and the school just threw some money at her. OTOH, if she spent a lot of years in school and is being paid market rate for a law professor and the school thinks their getting their money worth out of her, then you dont have a point. I do have to point out how dreadfully unfair it is to quote Obama's own words, and include the entire context. Oh for the good old days when politics were like groundhog day. You could say one thing and the next day deny it and there wasnt any pesky Fox news or the internet to fact check you.

You can tell from his remarks that Barry really resents his parents. I think he feels he succeeded in spite of them.

Why else would he list all sorts of government-funded endeavors instead of mentioning family at all? I'm where I am in life mainly because of my family, especially my parents. Maybe Barry can cut my taxes, so I can pay back whatever 'debt' he's talking about by caring for them in old age.

It all starts with the family, Barry. Not the fucking Dept. of Public Works.

George Washington: "...if there cannot be money found to answer the common purposes of education, not to mention the necessary commercial circulation, it is evident that there is something amiss in the ruling political power which requires a steady regulating and energetic hand to correct and control"

Thomas Jefferson: "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

In the beginning, there was individual spontaneous innovation. The people saw that it was good, that they were good, and they respected individual dignity.

Then arose the mortal gods and other opportunistic creatures to exploit the baser appetites (i.e. physical, material, and ego) of the people in order to elevate their own political, economic, and social standing.

The people witnessed progressive involuntary exploitation, denigration of individual dignity, and they rejected their masters on principle and through periodic revolutions.

An almost better riff would be between Santa Anna and Stephen Austin. Austin spent a couple of years in a Mexico City prison for reminding the Hidalgos that Texans had to raise a force of Rangers to do the job the Mexican Army wouldn't do.

America's Politico said...

The word is that the focus now is on GOP and Romney. He has spoiled our relations with England/Olympics.

So, in time, we will just focus on Romney and the Olympics.

Yeah, the big c communists in Blighty needed something to hold against the guy who's trying to unseat the small c communist here, so they made a fuss when the Romster told the truth.

Blogger platform is a good example too, I think. It is provided equally to every commenter here and yet some couldn't attract traffic to an area devoted to their own thoughts if they set their life to the cause, and yet another given the same platform will attract traffic in droves by simply sharing insights into her own interests and life. So much so that in fact the unsuccessful bloggers, lets call them conversationalists, feel they must visit the attractive blogger also just to be heard at all. Like me.

You guys always like to seize on successful people after they have achieved a certain plateau. In Ann's case, she's doing good now, but I bet that hasn't always been the case. She probably started out making piss-poor money as an asst. prof., having to work several years in that racket before making it through tenure. Her high pay now is a result of reaching a high point in her profession. She got there by sticking with it, performing well, and working through quite a few years of much lower pay. But merit is a foreign concept to you.

Her pay is likely equitable to other professors of her stature at schools around the country. As we know, Lizzie Lie-a-watha Warren makes quite a bit more than Ann.

When a businessperson makes a lot of money in a year, that's his or her reward for likely slogging through many years of shitty pay and wondering if and when their business will ever take off. Instead of paying more taxes, that person probably needs to pay off debt accumulated from those lean years, and would like to stockpile a little money in case things go south in the future.

For 9 bloody years the French and their Indian allies had fought from New France ( Canada )to keep The Ohio Territory west of the Allegheny Mountains for the King of France and the Catholics while the British Protestants and their Indian allies, with colonial some help, fought to take it for away from them.

After the 1763 treaty of Paris ceded Ohio, Louisian territory and Canada to King George, that rascally King pivoted to become an partial ally with the French Catholics he now ruled in Canada and of the Indian Tribes whose lands he was now promising to protect from the land hungry Colonials.

Overnight George Washington and friends knew they were at war with King George for those same lands as well as their own. The next 20 years saw that work its bloody way out.

It was Geo. Washington who in effect said to King George and the Parliament that " You didn't build this land for the first 150 years to suddenly waltz in and claim it's yours now."

Obama really is using the claims of a European/Roman Empire World government announcing its claims to The States which old white guy George Washington and his Scots Irish Presbyterian Rebels stole from them.

Blogger is a perfect example. It is created by another, hosted by Google, and Althouse is allowed to post here without paying fees, but is allowed to take advertising revenue from her writing.

"If you've got a blog, you didn't build that. If you’ve been successful [on a webpage you didn't create], you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart."

"If you've got spectacular opening ceremonies for the Olympics, you didn't build that on your own...""Yes, they did.""What? No, that's my point here. They didn't create that on their own...""Oh yes, yes, they did.""No, my theme here is shared efforts, collective effort-collective gain...""Sir, no one else is interested in taking credit for the opening ceremonies.""What?""Did you see them?""No, I had a meeting.""I wish I'd had one."

This just goes to show just how twisted and assbackwards leftists are in their thinking, taking a commonsense point of truth and distorting it and perverting it so that it is wholly contrary to that truth.

In this case, they take the good and right virtue of humility, the correct observation that humans are social creatures, and the concept of the social compact, freely entered into, and they take these and twist them into some justification for bowing down to government as your lord and savior.

In fact, at least one founder did speak directly to this point, that the individual depends upon the many in society, BUT the individual depends upon the many in society not to eliminate his individuality but precisely to preserve and protect him in the freedom of that individuality --

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto; the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him to quit his work, and every different want would call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune, would be death; for, though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.

Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but Heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other: and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue. . . .

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.--Common Sense (1776)

Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. . . .

Society grants him nothing. Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right.T. Paine, The Rights of Man

Obama's comments, far from being comments of humility and gratitude for the assistance of others, betray in their condescension a leftist belief that the state is, or ought to be, the provider of all things, not merely the goods necessary for the sustenance of life, but that people get their rights from the state, from government.

His remarks, in their usual leftism, reject the idea of inherent natural rights in the individual person, the idea that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights." Whatever you have, whatever you get -- including your fundamental rights and freedoms -- you got from or because of your government overlords. Individuals do not have -- cannot have -- the capacity to live their lives they proper way, they are in need of a Politburo, the vanguard of the proletariat, to run their lives for them.

In truth, of course, the American people know that they did not get one damn thing, and especially not their liberties, from that piss-poor Lenin wannabe, Obama the Messiah.

Ralph L Yes the King and Parliament had granted their favorites charters and pictures on Maps. But the occupation and industry went slowly across tha North Atlantic and hardly reached a hundred miles inland until 1730.

After that the pesky savages had to be dealt with by a continuous supply of bribes and by the local militias. Smallpox finally turned the tide allowing settlers as the weakened tribes had to fight each other to survive in large enough groups to be feared and get in on the bribes.

The fearless settlers were the Scots-Irish who were recruited to be sent out to the frontiere with the tribes as a buffer. The Quaker Religion required others to do their fighting for them.

That worked as planned but aroused much Quaker concern for the Indians in Penn's colony which had lived in a semi truce with Penn until the Scots-Irish were moved in and started killing too many indians. That ethnic group's fighting tendencies is still seen in and around Penn State and Pittsburg.

Anyway, the King of England owned everything he had by force mand coniving, and he wanted North America the same way. But he ran into those Scots-Irish that hated him with a deep resolve because of the 50 year earlier betrayal of their families in Northern Ireland for the benefiit of his buddies in London. They would not let that happen to them again here.

So the King of England had to go and take India, Kenya, Rhodesia and coastal China by force instead.

Blogger is a perfect example. It is created by another, hosted by Google, and Althouse is allowed to post here without paying fees

As is anyone. If you were any good at providing value to anyone online, you would have more than this.

but is allowed to take advertising revenue from her writing.

And google makes money off that same advertising. google isn't a charity; it's a business. It makes money by providing value to others. One of the way it does that is to allow anyone who wants write their own blog. If they're any good, i.e., add value to the lives of those who read them, they will get traffic. For this traffic, people will pay to advertise on their sit.

The odd think about you is that you look at a book and think of only the paper and ink. You fail to realize all the value of the book is due to the words printed on them. You look at an orchestra and think only of the wood and metal used to make the instruments. You fail to realize that all the value comes from the sound they make.

You look at a blog and only see the container google provides bloggers. You fail to realize all the value of any blog comes from the blogger himself.

Lord North: Look, if you colonists have been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by colonists and yeomen who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.

Bender quoting Thomas Paine. Wow. I thought I had Paine all to myself. Hmmph.

garage mahal: From what I've seen on this blog you are both gutless and brainless, entirely incapable of taking a stand and sustaining an argument as Paine did in his time. Instead you specialize in childish, drive-by, tu quoque taunts, e.g. @ 8:43 PM.

Not T. Paine's style at all. Paine was complicated, fiery, and not entirely sound, but what a mind and heart!

"Somebody tell Unknown Tom was in Paree when the Constitution was written, so thankfully they didn't take him up on his idea."

And, with Franklin, selling US sovereignty to France and themselves to license. John Kerry, call your office.

"Obama really is using the claims of a European/Roman Empire World government announcing its claims to The States which old white guy George Washington and his Scots Irish Presbyterian Rebels stole from them."

Almost. Today it's Arab/Pan-African Empire/Imperialism, with one Supreme Pretender occupying the White House and using US assets to enforce personal supremacy world-wide.

Unknown: When Washington was writing about "enough money" he was writing in 1788 before adoption of the Constitution when there was not a viable currency under the Articles of Confederation. He was not even remotely referring to the taxing power. He did feel that the new Constitution would "regulate" the country by giving it a viable currency.

The specific reference was to a lack of money for Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. The usual donors could not give because there was little cash in circulation.

The Constitution was adopted and the country has had a more or less reliable money supply ever since. Dickinson College survived and prospered and is still a fine school today, having somehow staggered along for 200 years without government support.

When you parrot quotes like that without understanding them in the slightest, all you do is underline liberalism's stupidity. I am not calling you stupid, though you were lazy and careless on this one.

For some time now, Obama has lived in the same country as all the people who have built businesses. He has had the same access to all of the tax payer funded resources ... more so, perhaps, with his education. And he never built anything productive whatsoever. Nothing. He organized others who also failed to build anything productive despite the abundance of tax payer funded resources. There seems to be a lot of that going around. It seems to me he has no clue what is involved in the task.

Apparently Warren, Obama, et al, are unfamiliar with the meaning of the term 'trailblazer'. The early European settlers followed the Indian trails, which were made as the Indians followed the ancient animal migration trails.But at some point the settlers needed to get to new places to hunt, trap, farm, etc., and they had to make their own trails. Then they had to clear their own land, build their own mills. Some set up trading posts and blacksmith shops. None of these were helped along by government roads or public education.The real bottom line is that: 'Capitalism pays for socialism, not the other way around.'

Remember when the left thought taking a politician's statements and twisting them into the absurder was a good, noble thing? An art, even? I can't wait until we have a Republican president again so all the simple things in life -- journalism, whistle blowing on the government, making fun of people in power -- become things Americans can do again comfortably without fear of being insulted.

An important fact missing from liberal economic analysis is that the government and its financial demands have been steadily, remorselessly growing over the years. The tax, deficit and debt issues we face today bear almost no relationship to those faced in 1788 or even 1932.

If we could roll back federal and state budgets to 1996 levels we would go a long ways to solving our current problems.

"Blogger is a perfect example. It is created by another, hosted by Google, and Althouse is allowed to post here without paying fees, but is allowed to take advertising revenue from her writing."

Except that the owner of Blogger is perfectly and voluntarily happy with that arrangement, because he is able to add Althouse's traffic count to his site count and convince those same advertisers that it's worth it to buy access to Blogger. That makes him money also.

You never seem to understand that there's a difference between voluntary agreements between two parties and taking at government gunpoint.

I believe it was the recognition that left to himself man is a beast and needs some sort of social contract in order for the society to thrive. Further it is clear that we survived as a race because the tribe worked together to secure food and shelter. And while the Virginia Company was made up of private investors, it gained protection after the defeat of the Spanish Armada at the hands of the English Navy. Of course if the native Americans had been hostile, rather than friendly early history might be re-written. Yes there were strong individuals who build the colony, but it was build with help; they didn't quite get there on their own.

Aren't you glad that the President (who didn't get that Harvard law degree on his own for sure) is such a super duper constitutional scholar?

The Catholic family that owns a Colorado-based company won a court victory in their battle to stop the Obama administration from requiring them to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception, a mandate they say violates their religious beliefs and First Amendment rights.

Hercules Industries, a Denver-based heating ventilation and air conditioning manufacturer that employs nearly 300 full-time workers, got an injunction in federal court which stops enforcement of the controversial ObamaCare mandate. The company’s lawyers said they needed the injunction immediately because if the mandate is enforced, it must begin immediately making changes to its health plan, which renews on Nov. 1.

The case is similar to ones brought by Catholic-based colleges that have refused to provide employee insurance with such coverage, except this time, it is a secular corporation.

In his order, Colorado District Judge John Kane said that the government’s arguments “are countered, and indeed outweighed, by the public interest in the free exercise of religion.”

Obama assumes that not only are you not responsible for your own success, you didn't contribute to anyone else's either. Neither did you contribute through taxation or paying back the loans (with interest) you got.

Therefore, in Obama's eyes, you OWE the government more, MORE, and MUCH MORE in taxes just because you're successful.

traditionalguy said..."...That worked as planned but aroused much Quaker concern for the Indians in Penn's colony which had lived in a semi truce with Penn until the Scots-Irish were moved in and started killing too many indians. That ethnic group's fighting tendencies is still seen in and around Penn State and Pittsburg..."

And recall, in 2008, when then-candidate Obama was speaking privately to fundraising supporters in San Francisco, that these Pennsylvanians were the very people he was referring to as he tried to brainstorm about how to gain their political support:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

He still has no idea how to reach them and win their support - or why the values of those people have spread and were expressed in the elections of 2010 and continue to spread from Kansas to Alaska, Texas to New Hampshire, and every state between.

YEAH Garbage, Althouse ain't that smart; she ain't the only one that works hard. Anyone could have finished No. 1 in her law school class- she was just lucky according to resentful, hateful pricks like you and Prez Obama.

edutcher, "unknown" excised those two quotes so far out of context you'd never know that Jefferson was talking about the imploding French monarchy and feudal system in 1785 France. Or that Washington was talking about the failures of government under the Articles of Confederation, and the resulting economic/political collapse that spurred the Constitutional Convention.

Palladian, why do you put Clifford in a frame of thick black lines? Not criticizing, I'd just like to hear your thinking.

When I choose these historical subjects, it's usually based on my reaction to them as images, as subjects of someone else's portrait, someone who was able to have a physical interaction and impression of the sitter. I'm mostly doing a portrait of a portrait.

I can't say what motivates my marks. Perhaps something to do with marks and lines on the old negatives and positive prints. Perhaps it's some reaction to the subject's biography. Perhaps it's something else.

Thomas Jefferson: "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

Yes, he said it. And yes, he later (1816) realized it's not just a bad idea, but "extra taxation violates" one of nature's laws.

You can tell from his remarks that Barry really resents his parents. I think he feels he succeeded in spite of them.

Can you blame Hussein Soetero? Baby daddy ditched him and mama before the ink was dry on the long form birth certificate, and mom dumped him off on his "typical white person" gramma so that she (mom) could jet off to become the next Margaret Meade.

One of the reasons socialist countries have told people they either can't leave (USSR) or have to pay to leave (Sweden) goes along these same lines. The state did all this for you and now you owe it. You can't just go. Nice way of saying they think your a serf. Speaking of which; serfs can't carry arms so we need to talk about some reasonable weapons control.